Daniel Day-Lewis: the greatest screen actor ever?

With the 'Lincoln’ star predicted to win a ground-breaking third Best Actor
Oscar on Sunday night, David Gritten looks at Britain’s most reluctant star.

Amid all the hype and hoopla routinely surrounding the Oscars, this weekend’s ceremony could be the stage for a genuinely impressive achievement. If Daniel Day-Lewis wins an Oscar for his admirable portrayal of Abraham Lincoln (and he is odds-on to do so), he becomes the first man to win three Academy Awards for Best Actor.

Given that only nine actors in history have won two – others include Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman – Day-Lewis’s brush with history-making feels under-reported. It’s as if he’s arrived on the threshold of this exalted position by stealth.

That’s typical of Day-Lewis, who operates beneath Hollywood’s radar, living his life and working as privately as he possibly can. He’ll happily accept awards for his work and his films – but you won’t catch him hanging out at parties or posing for photos on the red carpet at other people’s premieres. He barely registers in the 24/7 media chatter about the movie business, only surfacing at all when he becomes an awards contender.

Yet a third Oscar for him would fuel proclamations that he may be the greatest screen actor ever. There’s already a strong argument that no other actor becomes so deeply immersed in different characters. Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Lincoln is a case in point: he plays him near the end of his life, with a shuffling gait, a reedy, cracked voice and a spot-on Kentucky accent. Imagine Honest Abe in your mind’s eye, and that’s how Day-Lewis looks and sounds.

Now scroll back the years and recall him as disabled Irish writer-artist Christy Brown in My Left Foot; the ranting oil tycoon in There Will Be Blood; Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans; and a gay Londoner in an inter-racial romance in My Beautiful Laundrette. Can all these characters possibly be the same actor?

The answer is: yes, but only after much detailed work. On the My Left Foot set, he refused to leave his wheelchair and asked crew members to feed him and push him around. To authentically portray the fearsome Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Day-Lewis perfected the craft of sharpening knives between takes. Before playing Hawkeye, he survived by his own wits for days, alone in acres of wilderness. As a falsely accused IRA man in In the Name of the Father, he went without sleep for three nights before a gruelling interrogation scene.

In Brando’s day, this was called Method acting – a term that amuses Day-Lewis. Accepting a Bafta earlier this month for Lincoln, he quipped that his “method” was “to stay in character as myself for the past 55 years”. Not quite. When There Will Be Blood was released, I interviewed him on stage after a screening of the film for Bafta voters. There had been a two-year lag between completion of the script and the start of shooting, surely longer than any actor would need to get inside a character’s head. Had he found that frustrating?

“No,” he said. “It was glorious. Glorious. Because at what point do you say you have fully investigated the life of a human being? Once your curiosity is unleashed there is no satisfying it. I could have quite happily done that for years.”

He maintains this intensity on set, though he reportedly arrives so well prepared he needs little rehearsal. He chose to steer clear of actor Paul Dano on There Will Be Blood; they were playing sworn enemies, and he had no wish to compromise the illusion. On Lincoln, he spoke in Abe’s voice, even when the cameras were not rolling, and asked British crew members who shared his native accent not to chat with him.

Day-Lewis grew up in Greenwich with his older sister Tamasin, now a documentary-maker and TV chef. His father, Irish-born Cecil Day-Lewis, was Poet Laureate from 1968 till his death four years later. His mother, Jill Balcon, was an actress descended from Jewish immigrants; her father Michael headed Ealing film studios.

One might imagine a lively, creative household, but Cecil worked long hours behind closed doors; the children, Tamasin has said, tended to eat meals in their own rooms. Reading between the lines, Daniel’s childhood seems to have been unruly and unhappy, but when receiving an award from Bafta’s Los Angeles branch last year he acknowledged his debt to his mother (who died in 2009): “She always had faith in me, when I had little faith in myself.”

Having discovered acting, he found his feet in the creative environment of Bedales school in Hampshire. While he was there he landed a bit part in the film Sunday Bloody Sunday, and though he also yearned to be a cabinet-maker, he joined Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, then drifted into TV work and small film roles.

He first attracted transatlantic attention in 1986, when My Beautiful Laundrette, which showcased his gay punk character, opened at the same time as the Merchant Ivory costume drama A Room With a View, in which he played Helena Bonham Carter’s foppish fiancé. The two roles could scarcely have been more different; the conviction he brought to both was noted, and he was on his way.

His reputation for never breaking character on sets came to look deeply eccentric, a view confirmed when Day-Lewis, playing Hamlet at the National in 1989, broke down on stage and had to leave the production. It was rumoured he had seen the ghost of his late father, something he admitted years later. He never worked in theatre again.

Instead he eased into a film career, working infrequently and choosing his roles with care. Day-Lewis keeps his private life under wraps, but it’s known he lived with French actress Isabella Adjani for six years. Their son Gabriel is now 17. In 1996, while filming Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, he met the playwright’s daughter, writer and artist Rebecca. They married that same year; in Arthur Miller, Day-Lewis gained a literary patriarch in his life to match his own father. The couple have two boys, aged 14 and 10, and live in tranquil locations far from Hollywood – near America’s east coast and Ireland’s Wicklow mountains.

It’s been quite a career, one he now looks back upon with incredulity. “I just set out to try and work,” he told Bafta LA, with good humour. “I’m quietly amazed by the whole thing.” The key word here is “quietly”. Day-Lewis is a subdued man in a loud world and a brash industry. He cannot be pushed, branded or marketed. He will only take roles if he sincerely wants them, and otherwise prefers not to work. He refuses to play Hollywood’s games or let studio publicists dictate his life.

One imagines that if he lifts an Oscar on Sunday, he’ll be back in Wicklow a few days later, surrounded by his family, maybe fishing or doing a little woodwork. He seems to have arrived at peace in his private life, and at 55 he’s as fulfilled and autonomous in his work as any actor could possibly be.

It makes you wonder: is Daniel Day-Lewis really just an eccentric? Or could it be he’s the sanest – not to mention the finest – movie star we’ve got?